Transcript: Trump Hit by Brutal Fox Graphic on Tariffs as Polls Worsen
Sargent: I sure hope so. I want to highlight a key number from a new CNN poll as well. His approval is also underwater in this poll, but critically, it finds that a majority, 52 percent, say that Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the nation’s most important problems. Again, for voters, that’s going to be the economy and prices, but I think there’s a way to weave that into the case you’re making. The insanity with annexing Greenland and stealing the Panama Canal, that sort of stuff—those aren’t our most important problems. So if Democrats feel like everything has to be reducible to the kitchen table or whatever, they can at least say it that way, right? “Why is Trump running this authoritarian experiment when there are problems to solve?” but talk about the authoritarian experiment.
Rosenberg: Listen, when I think about what you just said, I come back to something that I really felt during the Democratic convention last year. We were seeing, in some ways, the most powerful Democratic Party that I had personally engaged with since I had started in this business a long time ago. And the reason why is I felt our convention was not about progressivism or moderation; it was about love of country, and there was this powerful patriotism that pulsed through the convention that was really compelling to me. For us to really defeat Trump, we’re going to have to tap into love of country and patriotism, to hug the flag and all the things, [to show] that we are the true America. He’s the betrayer. He’s the appeaser of foreign authoritarian.
We have to add this to the narrative because it makes it really powerful. It also, I think, brings in a lot of Reaganite Republicans, people who were proud of their parties defeating the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Donald Trump is trying to relitigate the Cold War here to some degree, right? And I think that we can continue to bring people along into our coalition on both fronts. Not only the economic front where I think there’s going to be a lot of disappointment in Trump’s leadership—there already is—but also in his betrayal of the country and his appeasing of foreign dictators. What could be less American than that?
